Monday, September 13, 2010

Ideas

Ok. If I’m going to tell you the story of how this novel idea came to be, we’re going to have to travel back in time, before the Great Hard Drive Meltdown, before my computer was organized and I didn’t know what any of the documents were, before I even had a computer…in short, back to when my brother and I played with toys.
My brother had these things called “Imaginext”. They were kind of like Lego, in that you had various pieces you could put together to build castles or pirate ships or dungeons or wizard towers or whatever (we had the medieval set, if you couldn’t tell), except the characters were more lifelike, and you couldn’t take their heads off. Anyway, we would make up the most complicated story lines for these toys…it was epic. My brother being young and impressionable, I basically dictated what would happen. I gave these characters names, jobs, relationships, backstory…everything, it turns out, you need for a novel.
Fast forward a few years. It’s the summer, or maybe just the weekend. I haven’t got any work to do. I decide to do a little spring cleaning on my laptop, and come across a document titled “characterlist”. Curious, I open it up. And what do I find? Everything I had invented for that game, typed up. Suddenly, I was delighted. Reading the document, I had ideas upon ideas for these characters. I started writing them down. And then I thought “Why not write a book?”. I have been an avid reader for years, especially of fantasy, and this seemed to me to be the logical next step.
“Ok, fine.” You’re thinking. “You felt like writing a novel. So why haven’t you started? And what on earth is that NaNoWriMo thing you mentioned in the last post?” Hold on, hold on. I’m getting there.
The truth is, I was at a loss as to how to begin. I mean, I wanted to write a novel, but how do you really do that? Open up Word, type “Chapter One”, and just start? Outline first? I’d never written anything more that 20 pages or so, and that was a research paper. Creative writing wise, it was more like 10. I was overwhelmed.
So I did what anyone in the digital age would do - I googled. I read answers.com pages, ask.com pages, eHow pages, authors’ websites and blogs, agent’s blogs, and somehow (I forget exactly how) I stumbled upon National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I read their website and I thought to myself “What a brilliant idea!”.
At that point it was somewhere around April. I figured that NaNo, held in November, would give me just the push I needed to get started, while still giving me a few months to sort out the backstory and maybe even outline the plot. Perfect! I conveniently chose to ignore that the fall would be one of the most hectic times of my life. I work best under pressure anyway.
So that’s basically how the whole thing got started. The blog is just my way to keep myself sane throughout process - and maybe other aspiring authors can commiserate.
As for why I thought NaNo during senior fall would be a good idea, well, I never did. I still don’t. It’s going to be interesting, to say the least.